The Pivot of Civilization eBook

In considering the data furnished by these intelligence
tests we should remember several factors that should
be taken into consideration. Irrespective of
other considerations, children who are underfed, undernourished,
crowded into badly ventilated and unsanitary homes
and chronically hungry cannot be expected to attain
the mental development of children upon whom every
advantage of intelligent and scientific care is bestowed.
Furthermore, public school methods of dealing with
children, the course of studies prescribed, may quite
completely fail to awaken and develop the intelligence.

The statistics indicate at any rate a surprisingly
low rate of intelligence among the classes in which
large families and uncontrolled procreation predominate.
Those of the lowest grade in intelligence are born
of unskilled laborers (with the highest birth rate
in the community); the next high among the skilled
laborers, and so on to the families of professional
people, among whom it is now admitted that the birth
rate is voluntarily controlled.(3)

But scientific investigations of this type cannot
be complete until statistics are accurately obtained
concerning the relation of unrestrained fecundity
and the quality, mental and physical, of the children
produced. The philosophy of Birth Control therefore
seeks and asks the cooperation of science and scientists,
not to strengthen its own “case,” but
because this sexual factor in the determination of
human history has so long been ignored by historians
and scientists. If science in recent years has
contributed enormously to strengthen the conviction
of all intelligent people of the necessity and wisdom
of Birth Control, this philosophy in its turn opens
to science in its various fields a suggestive avenue
of approach to many of those problems of humanity
and society which at present seem to enigmatical and
insoluble.

(1) Conklin, The Direction
of Human Evolution, pp. 125,
126.

(2) The Glands Regulating Personality:
A study of the glands of internal secretion in
relation to the types of human nature. By
Louis Berman, M. D., Associate in Biological
Chemistry, Columbia University; Physician to the Special
Health Clinic. Lenox Hill Hospital. New
York: 1921.

(3) Cf Terman: Intelligence
of School Children. New York 1919. p. 56.
Also, “Is America Safe for Democracy?”
Six lectures given at the Lowell Institute of
Boston, by William McDougall, Professor of Psychology
in Harvard College. New York, 1921.